What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky(33)

Nneoma told herself she wouldn’t check her messages again for at least another hour and prepared for her daily run. A quick peek revealed that no messages were waiting anyway. She keyed the code into the gate to lock it behind her, stretched, and launched.

The run cleared the last vestiges of yesterday’s ghosts. She would call Claudine today to see how serious this whole falling thing was. There’d be only so much the PR rep could legally say, but dinner and a few drinks might loosen her tongue. Nneoma lengthened her stride the last mile home, taking care to ease into it. The last time she’d burst into a sprint she pulled a muscle, and the pain eater assigned to her was a grim man with a nonexistent bedside manner. She’d felt his disapproval as he worked on her. No doubt he thought his talents wasted in her cozy sector and was tolerating this rotation till he could get back to the camps. Nneoma disliked Mathematicians like him and they disliked ones like her. It was a miracle she and Kioni had lasted as long as they did.

As she cleared the corner around her compound, she saw a small crowd gathered at her gate. Protesters? she wondered in shock before she registered the familiar faces of her neighbors. When she neared, a man she recognized but could not name caught her by the shoulders.

“We called medical right away. She was banging on your gate and screaming. She is your friend, no? I’ve seen her with you before.” He looked very concerned, and suddenly Nneoma didn’t want to know who was there to see her and why.

It was just a beggar. The woman wore no shoes and her toes were wounds. How on earth had she been able to bypass city security? Nneoma scrambled back when the woman reached out for her, but froze when she saw her fingers, delicate and spindly, like insect legs.

Those hands had once stroked her body. She had once kissed those palms and drawn those fingers into her mouth. She would have recognized them anywhere.

“Kioni?”

“Nneoma, we have to go, we have to go now.” Kioni was frantic and kept looking behind her. Every bare inch of her skin was scratched or bitten or cut in some way. Her usually neat coif of dreadlocks was half missing, her scalp raw and puckered as if someone had yanked them out. The smell that rolled from her was all sewage.

“Oh my God, Kioni, oh my God.”

Kioni grabbed her wrists and wouldn’t surrender them. “We have to go!”

Nneoma tried to talk around the horrified pit in her stomach. “Who did this to you? Where do we have to go?”

Kioni shook her head and sank to her knees. Nneoma tried to free one of her hands and when she couldn’t, pressed and held the metal insert under her palm that would alert security at the Center. They would know what to do.

From her current angle, Nneoma could see more of the damage on the other woman, the scratches and bites concentrated below the elbow. Something nagged and nagged at her. And then she remembered the Australian, and the stories of him trying to eat himself.

“Kioni, who did this?” Nneoma repeated, though her suspicion was beginning to clot into certainty and she feared the answer.

Kioni continued shaking her head and pressed her lips together like a child refusing to confess a lie.

Their falling-out had started when Nneoma did the unthinkable. In violation of every boundary of their relationship (and a handful of Center rules), she’d asked Kioni to work on her father. Kioni, who volunteered herself to the displaced Senegalese and Algerians and Burkinababes and even the evacuees, anyone in dire need of a grief worker, was the last person she should have asked for such a thing, and told her so. Nneoma had called her sanctimonious, and Kioni had called her a spoiled rich girl who thought her pain was more important than it actually was. And then Kioni had asked her to leave.

Now she needed to get Kioni to the Center. Whatever was happening had to be fixed.

“They just come and they come and they come.”

Nneoma crouched down to hear Kioni better. Most of her neighbors had moved beyond hearing distance, chased away by the smell. “Who comes?” she asked, trying to keep Kioni with her.

“All of them, can’t you see?”

She began to understand what was happening to her former girlfriend.

How many people had Kioni worked with over the last decade? Five thousand? Ten? Ten thousand traumas in her psyche, squeezing past each other, vying for the attention of their host. What would happen if you couldn’t forget, if every emotion from every person whose grief you’d eaten came back up? It could happen, if something went wrong with the formula millions and millions of permutations down the line. A thousand falling men landing on you.

Nneoma tried to retreat, to close her eyes and unsee, but she couldn’t. Instinct took over and she raced to calculate it all. The breadth of it was so vast. Too vast.

The last clear thought she would ever have was of her father, how crimson his burden had been when she’d tried to shoulder it, and how very pale it all seemed now.





GLORY




When Glory’s parents christened her Glorybetogod Ngozi Akunyili, they did not foresee Facebook’s “real name” policy, nor the weeks she would spend populating forms and submitting copies of her bills and driver’s license and the certificate that documented her birth on September 9, 1986, a rainy Tuesday, at 6:45 p.m., after six hours of labor and six years of barrenness. Pinning on her every hope they had yet to realize, her parents imagined the type of life well-situated Igbos imagined for their children. She would be a smart girl with the best schooling. She would attend church regularly and never stray from the Word. (Amen!) She would learn to cook like her grandmother, her father added, to which her mother countered, why not like her mother, and Glorybetogod’s father hemmed and hawed till his wife said maybe he should go and eat at his mother’s house. But back to Glorybetogod, whom everyone called Glory except for her grandfather, who called her “that girl” the first time he saw her.